


betwixt the devil and the deep sea

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Genre: .......a character study via demons, Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 20:34:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5942197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His name was not always Jack Sparrow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	betwixt the devil and the deep sea

His name was not always Jack Sparrow.

 

He claws his way up from Hell blindly, not so much running toward as running from. (The cold slush of the third circle follows in his bones, a reminder.) He runs to the edge of Hell, where the ice gives way to the skin of the world, stretched thin as a drum. It breathes, in and out like a living thing.

When he steps onto the trembling skein it gives under him, and—

The feeling is alien and he is choking on it, lost in it, dizzy with the warmth all around him. He struggles to find which way is _up_ and _around_ and _here._ To understand where he ends and the-warmth-that-is-not-him begins. He has never died (he isn’t sure he can) but it might feel like this.

His sight clears slowly, and he is up to his neck in water, only water. He has never known water to be warm; its currents rock him, and he flails to keep his head above the waves. In every way he looks, the horizon circles him like arms. (When he breathes, the air is warm.) 

The sun refracts on the water, scattering light into his eyes. All is quiet.

(He is so blinded, grateful, it takes him a while to notice the pain stealing under his skin with the tide.)

By the time he scrabbles to shore, his flesh is bubbling, peeling away blackened strips. Later, he learns it’s the salt—it makes the sea something close to holy water, a bulwark for the Divine Enemy’s precious apes. The ocean is a thing evil cannot touch.

He sits there and watches the tide come in and out, picking at his skin as it scabs over. His whole being aches, salt in his eyes and mouth; he is shivering and alone beneath a sky too wide to wrap his arms around, but it is not Hell. None of it is Hell.

His first attempt at laughter comes out grating and startled, waterlogged, choking. It sounds like the crash of the tide.

 

The first time he’s shown a ship—not even a ship, a reed boat with papyrus sails, bobbing in the lee tide—he thinks _oh_. He has heard the stories of the Fallen, how they taught humanity geometry and the reading of stars, how to smith weapons for shedding blood and cast enchantments to steal all else. Humanity is always hungry, and swallowed poisoned fruit with the sweet; the Fallen had crowed about it after, how they ruined the Enemy’s Beloved Children.

But none of them taught this, could have. He knows. It would not have occurred to an angel to build something so fragile as humanity’s bones, to send it out towards the horizon in search of—

He never gets the same answer, when he asks _what, for what, to what_. Perhaps the searching is enough.

(He watches them unfurl the sail, and cast off from the dock. With whatever shriveled organ pumps black blood through his rotting veins, he falls in love.)

 

Her name is not Calypso yet. (Then again, his name is not yet Jack. They have that in common.) She was better worshiped in those days, her altars strewn with fruit and flowers to mask the smell of bleeding, throats opened to appease her. The ocean is a thing evil cannot touch, but it loved violence before evil ever came to teach it how.

When the goddess not yet called Calypso walks towards him, her hips roll like the tide and she carries the stench of salt-rime in her hair. She gazes at him with a fish’s eyes, silvered and unblinking, for a long moment before declaring, _you are no god_.

 _neither are you,_ he answers, regretting it even as the words cross his lips. (Bad form, to mention monotheism in mixed company)

But she only laughs, and it is the crack of hulls breaking. She says, _yes, a goddess is known wherever she walks.  
_

Her hands burn like saltwater against his skin, and she teaches him the language of the monsters that live in the deep trenches, far from the light. He does not tell her he knows their tongues already, he is one of them. 

 

‘Sparrow’ was given to him by a Southwark girl whose painted mouth had faded with the night. He made smile with a idle chatter and praise, and she said he was brown as a sparrow, and twice as vulgar. _I could never give my heart to a sailor-lad,_ she teased. _You’d take it with you to Davy’s locker._

Her grave was never marked, except by him.

He takes ‘Jack’ from a lover, who died too young of the plague. (He doesn’t remember which. Plagues came like waves those days, taking lives out with the tide.) Jack—the first, mortal and dying—is still warm when the angel Samael comes, dark circles beneath their many eyes.

 _Please,_ a demon begs, though demons do not, not ever, _just this one. One mortal amid countless, who would notice?_

Samael has no mouth with which to answer. They reach out, gather up the burning spark of a soul and depart on wings black as death. And then Jack (the undying, the only) is alone.

 

Barbossa’s wings drag over the sides of the deck, shedding ash and feathers into the water. It’s a wonder that the crew don’t notice, or tread on them, but then Jack has never fully understood what mortal eyes see. Barbossa has never raised the matter, and so they do not discuss it.

(The broad brim of Barbossa’s hat nearly disguises the broken circlet of his halo, the way Jack’s braids and trinkets almost hide his horns. They do not discuss that either.)

The first time Captain Jack Sparrow goes to give his first mate an order, he meets Barbossa’s gaze and sees a pinprick of divine light staring out from the abyss of his eyes. Jack’s voice dies in his throat, and he turns away.

(Before Barbossa maroons him on that forsaken island, he leans in close and hisses in Jack’s ear, _did you really think I would content myself beneath you, in service of Lilith-born scum_?

Jack spits back the only curse he knows in Enochian, and Barbossa laughs before walking away down the beach, his wings dragging in the sand.)

 

Will Turner is a Good Man, which is rarer than the alternative—saints and devils are ten a penny, but a Good Man is more precious than rubies. (Probably. Jack has never met one before.)

He might have even tried to tempt him, see if he could tarnish that brightness with a little sulfur. Jack’s infernal talents are somewhat rusty—humanity manages to lead itself astray most of the time—but it would be easy, so easy. Gluttony is desire’s ravenous cousin, and the beautiful blacksmith’s boy with his fantasies of playing the dashing hero needs only a little push.

Only—there’s something about his mouth, his eyes, that reminds Jack of Jack (the first, the dead.) A softness, maybe. A flicker of something that a man of faith might call divinity, worn closer to the skin than in the rest of the apelike mob.

Jack is not a man of faith. Jack is not a man, really, semantically. And so Jack does not _believe in_ the soul, the way he does not _believe in_ rain, or wind, or the sun rising. One doesn’t have to believe unalterable facts about the world, they just are. (Jack reaches out, touches the shoulder of Bootstrap Bill’s son, and imagines that some of that Goodness comes away on his fingertips. The closest Jack Sparrow will ever come to—)

Then there is Elizabeth Swann, and Jack forgets almost entirely about Will Turner altogether.

 

Elizabeth Swann is not a Good Woman. Elizabeth Swann is mostly Elizabeth Swann, and Jack Sparrow is certain that he could not tempt her into anything she did not want in the first place. Will Turner’s little fancies could have been coaxed into gluttony, with time—but Elizabeth Swann would already have been waiting there for them both, trying to fit the world between her jaws. 

If Elizabeth Swann is hellbound, she will walk there under her own power, in comfortable boots, that spade of a chin thrust out as she demands to be shown to her throne.

Jack pities whatever First Circle gatekeeper tries to deny her it.

 

 _You have horns,_ Elizabeth Swann observes on Rumrunner’s Isle, squinting at the top of his head. The firelight is in her eyes and lying sweetly on her breast, and Jack can’t help thinking that this is what Lilith must have looked like, all those days and ages ago, seducing the first men into making monstrous children with her. (Elizabeth Swann is beautiful, and full of monsters. Of this, Jack has no doubt.)

 _That’s the rum, love,_ Jack says smoothly, passing the bottle back to her. _Drink a little more, and they’ll vanish again._

 _No, you definitely have horns,_ she repeats, ignoring the bottle and sitting straight up. _Why do you have horns?_

 _Oh, I’m quite the devil,_ he offers in a lecherous tone, but when he leans in, she doesn’t flinch away. Instead, she looks at him with wide and sober eyes, her mouth twisted in a curious moue.

 _Are you? The devil?_ she asks, and his breath stops.

 _Drink a little more, Lizzie,_ he says gently, almost pleading, holding out the bottle like an offering. He only breathes again when she reaches out—

He jerks away when her fingers brush his horns instead, almost spilling the rum down his front. _**Don’t**_ , he snarls, and he can hear the slush and cold of his voice, the harmonics of the Pit. (Jack Sparrow is never angry, never loses his temper; Jack Sparrow is merry, witty, Jack Sparrow is impossible and laughs as he goes because the alternative is this, a reminder he can never wholly run, there is no horizon that will hide him.)

Elizabeth Swann is watching him, her eyes a little wider than a moment before, but otherwise unchanged. She says nothing.

Gingerly, she reaches forward, prises the bottle from his hand. And she drinks.

Later, after, she comes up beside him at the railing of the _Dauntless,_ as her dashing commodore makes heading for the Isle de Muerta. (And wouldn’t he be easy to lead astray, Commodore Norrington carries his hunger for rank and fame, for her, like a scarlet badge on his chest. Jack’s almost embarrassed for the lad, to wear his weaknesses so ready.)

 _I want to ask…_ Elizabeth Swann says, her gaze darting up to the crown of his head, the carefully-hidden horns.

He swallows. _I would not advise that, Lizzie m’dear. Cats have died for less._

The corner of her wide mouth ticks up, and Jack can’t help but think of that throne waiting for her. For a moment she simply gazes at him, thoughtfully, before asking— _Why a pirate, though?_

 _I like the sea,_ Jack Sparrow says, the words out of his mouth before he can craft a lie. It doesn’t happen often, and for a moment he doesn’t know how to continue. He adds, after a bit: _And those in this line of work know not to ask where you came from._

_But where do you come from, Jack Sparrow?_

_Captain_ , he tells her, grinning. _It’s ‘Captain’._

The blood-cursed gold has turned Barbossa into a skeletal thing, his feathers falling out in clumps, halo dangerously skewed and falling over one ear. His sort never did mix well with the native magics.

They fight with blades that cannot kill either of them, over gold that they both will see turn to dust before it will bring them any comfort. It feels more than a little ridiculous, but then, what else is there to do?

 _What now, Jack Sparrow?_ Barbossa asks, swinging wildly. _Are we to be two immortals locked in an epic battle until Judgement Day and trumpets sound?_

 _To be fair,_ Jack says, _we already were, somewhat._

(Jack shoots him with a musket ball carved of Empyrean steel, which cost a year and a day of his service, and several other things he’d rather not dwell on too much. But it does the job, and he watches Barbossa bleed red and leak light until there is nothing, nothing left. The feathers of his wings quietly burn to ash, there on the cave’s wet floor.

Other people might feel guilty killing an angel, even a fallen one. But then, Jack isn’t people. Not semantically, or otherwise.)

Turner calls him a good man, which is the most astonishing lie Jack Sparrow has heard told in his long life. Worse, Will genuinely believes it, because every man believes the world is full of men like him, and Will Turner is a Good Man.

Over Turner’s shoulder, Jack catches Elizabeth Swann’s gaze, and grins. He watches for the guilt, darting behind her eyes, for her to turn away; he’s more delighted when she doesn’t. Because Elizabeth Swann is not a Good Woman—but she is a pirate, and just gluttonous, world-hungry enough, to want a Good Man to think she might be.

 _It would never have worked between us, darling. I’m sorry,_ Jack Sparrow says as he leaves, because it wouldn’t have, and he is sorry. He can’t seem to stop telling her the truth.

They would have been a lovely conflagration. Maybe someday he’ll see her in Hell.

 

The crew pulls him up onto the deck of the _Pearl_ shaking, aching to the backs of his teeth and desperate to wash the salt from his skin. But the pain fades to a dull hum when he reaches out, touches the polished handles on the wheel.

(With whatever shriveled organ pumps black blood through his rotting veins, he falls in love, all over again.)

 _Bring me that horizon,_ he says, and Captain Jack Sparrow keeps running.


End file.
